Marriage: A basic and exigent good

Monist

Volumn 91, Issue 3-4, 2008, Pages 388-406

  Finnis, John ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 62449341579     PISSN: 00269662     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/monist2008913/421     Document Type: Article

References (26)

1. On the evaluative conditions for such description advanced in a general descriptive theory of human affairs, see Finnis, "On Hart's Ways: Law as Reason and as Fact," American Journal of Jurisprudence, 53 (2007) 25-53
2. See Finnis, Fundamentals of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press; Georgetown: Georgetown University Press, 1993), 1-6
3. See Finnis, "Law and What I Truly Should Decide," American Journal of Ju risprudence, 48 (2003) 107-29 at 109-12
4. On this distinction between "rational" and " reasonable" see Fundamentals of Ethics, 29-30, 52-53
5. The discussion of basic human goods in Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights [hereafter NLNR] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 86-87, failed to reach any clear or stable position on the place of transmission of life, procreation and marital friendship
6. Aquinas (when correctly translated) had it right (in this respect): see Finnis, Aquinas: Moral, Political and Legal Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 83
7. for the kinds of reasons outlined, in relation to the identification of basic human goods in general, in NLNR, 81-86
8. See (referring also to the Enlightenment fabrication of this myth about medieval times) Finnis, Aquinas, 4, 16
9. On this, and on the massive, fundamental misreadings and misrepresentation of Aquinas in John T. Noonan, Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965 and 1986
10. see Finnis, "The Good of Marriage and the Morality of Sexual Relations: Some Philosophical and Historical Observations," American Journal of Jurisprudence, 42 (1997) 97-134 at 102-14
11. also Finnis, Aquinas 143-54
12. Noonan's misrepresentations have their baleful influence everywhere; they wreck, for instance, the treatment of sex in marriage in the early modern era in Margaret R. Sommerville, Sex and Subjection: Attitudes to Women in Early-Modern Society (London: Arnold; New York: St Martin's Press, 1995) 118-40, though she rightly rejects outright (2, 130, 139, etc.) the myth that companionate marriage emerged from Protestantism (or Puritanism)
13. The liturgy known as the Sarum Rite, widely used in England and predating the Protestant Reformation by 450 years or more, begins its marriage rituals with the declaration that they are to join two bodies (ad conjugendum duo corpora), so that these in a way become one flesh, two souls (ut amodo sint una cam et duae animae); the central identical statement which each makes in order to give his or her commitment (det fidem) to the other, exclusively and permanently, is supplemented by the wife's undertaking to "be bonere and buxom [affable and willing] in bed and at board" and the husband's declaration "with my body I thee worship." See William Palmer, Origines Liturgicae (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1832), vol. II, 209-13
14. Dennis Freeborn, From Old English to Standard English (Toronto: University of Ottawa Press, 2nd ed'n. 1998), 6
15. also, in some respects fuller, "The Good of Marriage . . ." at 97-120
16. For all matters in this paragraph, see Finnis, "The Good of Marriage . . ." at 102-11 (not least notes. 2, 51, 115, 127 on female pleasure in marital intercourse)
17. For this account, see Finnis, Aquinas, 152; much more fully, "The Good of Marriage . . ." at 118-26
18. Showing how far the sex ethics of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, not to mention philosophically minded transmitters of their tradition, such as Musonius Rufus and Plutarch, correspond to that expounded in this essay, and how far Martha Nussbaum was willing to go in misrepresenting Plato: Finnis, "Law, Morality and 'Sexual Orientation'," Notre Dame Law Review, 69 (1994) 1049
19. slightly supplemented in Notre Dame Journal of Law, Ethics and Public Policy, 9 (1995) 11 at 18-20
20. see also Finnis, '"Shameless Acts' in Colorado: Abuse of Scholarship in Constitutional Cases," Academic Questions, 7, 4 (1994) 1 at 19-41
21. Robert P. George, "'Shameless Acts' Revisited: Some Questions for Martha Nussbaum," Academic Questions, 9, 1 (1995) 24-42
22. See, e.g., Finnis, "'The Thing I Am': Personal Identity in Aquinas and Shakespeare," Social Philosophy & Policy, 22 (2005) 250-82
23. also in Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred. D. Miller, and Jeffrey Paul (eds.), Personal Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 250-82
24. see Finnis, "Law, Morality, and 'Sexual Orientation'," in John Corvino (ed.), Same Sex: Debating the Ethics, Science, and Culture of Homosexuality (Rowman and Littlefield, 1997) 31-43 at 37-43 (pages written for that volume)
25. Stephen Macedo, "Homosexuality and the Conservative Mind," Georgetown Law Journal, 84 (1995) 261 at 280, says: "The focus on procreation [in the sex ethics represented by the present article] appears opportunistic: selected so as to allow sterile heterosexuals into the tent while keeping homosexuals out." But (1) there has been no selection of focus, however motivated; marriage is the form of life that corresponds to the need for a new generation of human persons to sustain all human goods, and to the need for children for the nurture of committed friends who take seriously their responsibility for bringing new persons in to the world; and the marital act does embody this commitment to the marital form of life by its uniting of the reproductive organs and all other levels of the spouses' being. And (2) in this ethics, the non-marital sex acts of heterosexuals, solitary or with another or others, are "outside the tent," too
26. Finnis, "Universality, Personal and Social Identity, and Law" (2007), SSRN: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract-id=1094277